I’m delighted to welcome Louise Restell as our special guest blogger today. Louise is Head of Public Affairs and CSR for a London city law firm. I first met Louise at a Convergence networking event and we’ve kept in regular touch ever since. I saw Louise again most recently at a lively Big Society debate earlier this week and she got in touch with me the following day with this provocative piece about service in the legal profession. Huge thanks to Louise for putting pen to paper, we hope you enjoy the read. Louise and I would be very keen to hear from you about your experiences of dealing with lawyers, good and not so good.
I love the title of this blog, it seems tailor made for the legal profession. In fact, I was rather surprised that Doug isn’t making a fortune out of law firms desperate to learn how to improve their customer service. Or not, since I know a thing or two about lawyers.
I have decided to take up Doug on his offer to write a guest blog as I was particularly flabbergasted this morning when a colleague told me about some emails he’d received. He is responsible for trying to get our lawyers to understand the new way the profession is regulated, which in a nutshell is about delivering what customers want rather than what lawyers decide to provide.
Following a routine presentation about what the changes will mean in our firm he was challenged over his use of the word ‘customer’. Lawyers, apparently, just have clients. He (and I) would beg to differ. But the stream of emails he received, taking him to task on this apparently semantic point, was extraordinary.
Lawyers do have clients – these are organisations they work with for a number of years and to whom they provide a range of services. They also have customers. Individuals, who don’t want to have an ongoing relationship with a lawyer. In fact they probably don’t even want to know who their lawyer is, they just want to get their compensation, their will or their new house.
The problem is by focussing on what they want to call their customers and providing the service they want to provide, lawyers don’t realise they are, in fact, doing dumb things to customers. It’s a bit like the coffin-makers with the rule that all coffins should be six feet long. They can pat themselves on the back if every coffin they make is, indeed, six feet long. But quite a lot of their tall customers might be a bit annoyed (if they weren’t dead).
Until they realise this, lawyers will continue to get a disproportionately high level of complaints. It’s a bit like going to a restaurant and eating the best steak ever. This won’t be what you remember if it took an hour to arrive, the waiter was rude and a 20 per cent ‘suggested service charge’ is added to your bill. Likewise, you can give fantastic legal advice, but if you are patronising, charge through the nose, bill higher than expected and never return phonecalls then your customers aren’t going to be happy.
